Ulbarich pardoned himself so that he could take a deep pull of ale. It was not as simple as everyone thought that it was, but he accepted his note back all the same. Pity for one and curiosity for the other. His life had become a series of questions that had to be answered. Questions that had very little to do with himself. Another lot of a soldier was that you were not a hero. No one, at the end of the day, gave a damn about you. Knights became legends and kings were protected with the lives of husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters. Soldiers were those lives. You would fade into history, always, because you were nothing. And as usual - as he so often predicted - not one of their words had anything to do with him.
He did not know why that surprised him. All the same.
When the mug came to rest again, he nodded with with pinched eyes and a pinched mouth in Onainat's direction. The ale had puckered his face - it was warm, it was flush with yeast, and it was fucking terrible despite the barkeep's best attempts - but his skin smoothed an instant later. Endless searching for a tavern that could provide you with cold ale and this was the best that it got. They lived in the mountains. Ice was all around them, even in the summer time, if you looked hard enough. Surely there was a way to make sure he didn't have to drink this swill. Neither of them was saying a thing. Perhaps Captain Uthral - Vedette, or whatever the hell she was calling herself now - had played a joke on him.
She had the face as satisfaction.
Ulbarich's hand moved, then, toward the epaulets he wore so proudly. Yellow tassels hung suspended there. One, perhaps, for every useless thing he did every single day. The soldier's index finger drew across the tassels slowly, very slowly, almost as though playing the strings on a harp. When he neared the extent of his reach - across the body was never that easy - Ulbarich spun his finger in the tassels twice, twisting them up for the space of a second or two. Eventually the tassels dropped down as they had been, and he faced the two of them once more. This time his smile was wry. This time his eyes held no mirth. The message, he thought, was quite clear.
Duty complicated everything. And you couldn't greet anyone the way you wanted to in front of a prince.